just like an angel, skin makes me cry
by sheriff stilinski
Summary: I want a perfect body, I want a perfect soul. AU!ChadSonny, could be triggering


Title: just like an angel, skin makes me cry

Summary: I want a perfect body, I want a perfect soul.

Author's Note: Title, summary, and first line belong to "Creep" by Radiohead. I just bought _Lana Del Rey's_ album and CREYS SHE'S PERF. Allllso, _Beach House_ is the cutest band ever. Okay. Peace out yo.

WARNING: This could be triggering, but this is supposed to be a tragic version of their relationship through a different scenario.

Dedication: LOLChanny819, I want to say I love you so very much. Baby doll, this is for you – because you're the only one who likes my attempts at Sonny With A Chance, so hi. Here you go. I love you. Tons. You don't even know. You've always been there for me. I just love you. This took me like, two months to write. It's not my best, but I wanted to say I love you and all.

/

_I don't care if it hurts, I wanna have control._

/

Sonny doesn't know what the Earth looks like anymore.

/

Time moves slow and still in her white room. Sometimes, she only sees black walls. The nurses tell her they're white, but she insists they're black. It seems important to say that. The doctors say she should write this in first person, but she doesn't like herself much, so she'll just write this in third person, like she knows what's going to happen at the end of this story.

She doesn't, if you were wondering. She just likes to pretend she does. And the doctors can't control her feelings or her thoughts – not really, no matter how hard they try.

/

There's a boy on her floor. His name isn't important, but he has this sunshine hair that puffs from his head like a newborn chick's feathers. He's seen the cut on her face. It is not hard to miss. She imagines how he kisses. She's only kissed one boy in her entire life, and he kissed her sloppily and she was tired right after, like all the time she had waited was just wasted by that one kiss.

He catches her eye from across the lunch room, and her hand slowly drifts down her scar, that hateful scar that landed her here. He smiles at her. He's new; she can tell. No one smiles in these places.

/

She wonders how he got here. People look at him through their doors and watch his smile grow wider and wider as he realizes they're looking. Sonny's roommate, a red headed bulimic named Megan, talks about how cute he is. Sonny doesn't understand why anyone would want to fall in love at a mental hospital. Every relationship seems like it would be doomed from the start.

(When she closes her eyes before falling asleep, his smile is imprinted on the back of her eyelids.)

/

He catches up with her after one of her therapy sessions. His fingers are threading through his hair, over and over and over and she thinks of needles sewing skin suits; out and into out and into. He has one of those lazy smirks on his face, and she wonders just why he's here. He looks like a normal kid – or maybe she's forgetting what normal looks like. She's so used to seeing wrists cut like ribbons and burned faces and broken bones. He looks polished and clean, wearing a polo and khakis like he's come out of a Ralph Lauren catalog.

His eyes are the brightest blue that she's seen in a long time. They remind her of a robin's egg, and his bird hair makes her heart do a little skip. It's the most emotion she's felt in a long, long time.

"Hi," he says, "I'm Chad Dylan Cooper. What's your name?"

She looks at him dead on. She has scared so many people with this stare and her dark scar, but he is not fazed. His lips quirk into a big, big smile and she wants to leave him alone so she can drown in her misery. But before she can run away, she blurts out, "Why are you here?"

His smile grows wider and before she can comprehend, his lips are right by her ear and his fingers are laced in hers.

"Every moment, I want to die."

She hasn't felt confused in a long time, but she is now, and as he leans in, she realizes how much she wants to kiss him. He stops right before her lips and he smiles, slow and lazy, "What about you?"

Her thoughts are tangled and her heart is racing underneath her too big sweater. Her palms sweat and her stomach aches, like she's opened herself up and shoved so much food inside it that she'll explode.

Before she came here, all she wanted to do was be enough. If that meant starving herself until she'd be tiny and perfect, then she would. If it meant she had to bleed the demons out, she would have the knife ready. Her body was constantly used to experiment her different methods to reach perfection. These things are not what you share with a person, with someone you have just barely known. These things scare normal people away and make them fearful.

"I just wanted to be enough," she says.

There's something tired in her words, and his fingers touch her face, trickling down her scar. She cannot feel it, but the knowledge that he's touching her makes her mournful. He looks at her without a smile on his lips, but there's no fear in his eyes either. He closes the gap between their lips, barely touching hers. She lets herself smile against his lips, a tiny little half smile, but it's still there.

He breathes slow into her mouth, leaving lemon breath and whispers real soft, "You should smile more. It scares away the demons."

He walks away and she can't help but let her smile grow.

/

They don't speak for a week after that, but it's not even like they need to. He'll see her smile at him across the lunch room and he'll give her that look that says all that his smiles do and her insides will flutter.

The doctors notice that she's lighter, nowadays. Her steps are bouncier and her eyes glow. They ask her how she feels and all the normal questions, but it sounds like they maybe think there is a different answer than her usual. She answers all the questions with a lilt to her voice.

She sees them writing less. She knows that's a good sign and when her session is over, one of the doctors smiles at her.

/

Her roommate wakes her up one morning, her eyes bright and excited. "One of the patients is having a breakdown!"

It was always an event when one of the patients broke down at the hospital, one that Sonny didn't like much. People gathered around the patient and watched until the doctors came and soothed them. Her roommate yanks her out of bed and into the hallway.

There is Chad, ripping the bird feathers from his head and there are streams of tears falling from his eyes. He's screaming but it looks like he doesn't even notice he is even doing it. Her breath is caught in her throat and her knees are buckling. He's hysterical and she wonders where his smile is. His pale wrist has a shallow cut (it's vertical and she knows the meaning so well) and she's running towards him before she can stop herself.

She can barely see through her tears, and she screams, "What are you doing?"

He looks up at her, his swift fingers pausing in their quest to rip his beautiful golden hair out of his head. His eyes are swirling and lighter than she's ever seen them. Tears are still coursing out of his eyes and running down his red cheeks. She touches his cut lightly with her fingers and the doctors come running towards him. She's sobbing and his fingers are bloody so she moves away as he reaches out to wipe her face.

The doctors move her away and take him to the white room, where they'll talk to him and calm him down, fix up the cut. They'll check the rooms to make sure there is nothing sharp. Maybe they'll double his medication, or change it completely. She hopes they don't move him.

She has her first nightmare in weeks, that night. He looks like an angel, but his wrists are open and his eyes are so light that they could be white.

She wakes up crying.

/

Her roommate looks worried about her lately. The doctors want her to continue on and give worried looks when she gets up later. She hasn't seen blood in a long time. She sees desperation and guilt every day, but never are they as strong as they were in Chad's eyes. He's still shut in his white walled room, and he may have a few more days left.

Sonny wishes he was okay.

Her theory on relationships inside the hospital seems to be true, even if they never were in a relationship, they will never be able to escape themselves.

/

He comes out of the room while she's going to take a shower, and he looks entirely the same as when he appeared in the ward for the first time. His hair, which was evened out, is covered in feathery tufts and his eyes are wide and blue, but this time it looks like he has been shocked into submission. He sees her and he smiles, but this time his happiness is light and fleeting.

She turns away from him, and this is the first time that she feels as if maybe he is just another ghost that plagues her.

/

(Sometimes, she wants to peel back all her skin.) She breathes every moment, eats all her food, and the nurses are less harsh with her. She is barely watched as she used to be. She thinks she's getting out soon.

She wants to stay. She is not better. She is so tempted to take scissors and slice her arms like butter.

(She wants his feather hair on her pillow and his laugh against her breast.) They say that sexual desire grows stronger when a person is healed. She doesn't care much for the specifics, but she would like to kiss him under the moon and hold his hand in front of a crowd. One day, she could imagine them getting out and growing old, and maybe she wouldn't be as scared and neither would he.

She would like that.

/

Her therapist offers her to leave the hospital. She is doing well, he says, looking forward to things, joining in activities, reacting well to her medication. She thinks about this long and hard. She thinks about the lush green that lingers outside her door. She thinks about the friends she left behind and the times they'd spend together where she'd forget about everything: her name, her depression, the need to be something more than what she was. She barely remembers the feeling of being alive, but it's still there, aching to be felt. That is what she wants – to be alive again. To have a life full of periods, not just moments, where life felt like living. She wanted the lift in her stomach when she could really tangibly feel her happiness.

And yet, there was something so scary about leaving the safety of the hospital. But the white walls that looked more white every day, and she knew that was a sign. The only thing holding her back was blue eyes and the terrified feeling that she was going to lose something – even if she hadn't even had it – incredibly great for freedom.

So she mentions it to her therapist, the blue eyes that haunt her. Her only last tie to the hospital. Her one last anchor that makes her cling to the tiled floors of the hospital.

And then, that is when things become very, very bad.

The doctors put her in an isolated room. They try to tell her scary things. Things that terrify her. She wants to bleed away this pain, try to escape from their white coats and their harsh words.

"He isn't real_,"_ they say.

One nurse touches Sonny's cheek and says, "He is not real. I am. Do you see the difference_?"_

No, she does not see the difference, she aches to say. She sees him right there, behind the nurse's back, smiling at her, thick tufts of feather hair poking from his head.

He mouths, _I love you, _and that is when Sonny starts to scream.

/

The plans to leave the hospital are thrown out of the window.

Sonny is fed food by nurses and she is handed more and more medication. He doesn't come as often, but whenever he does, his fingers brush the roots of her hair and his eyes are always bright blue, even though the outline of his body is slowly fading each time. The doctors watch her closely, and her body is constantly shaking – never generating enough heat.

She doesn't know who is real anymore.

/

Her mother comes to visit, which she never does, and she cries at the sight of her daughter. There is something so sad about it all, and Sonny just melts into her chair, covering her eyes with her hands. She can see him in the darkness she creates, his vibrant eyes and his quirky smile.

She cannot stop hoping that everyone has got it wrong, or that maybe instead, she was the one made up in someone's head. She thinks that would be better – being someone else's ghost, haunting them and making them go insane. She does not like the thought that all the hard work she had done has brought her to this damned hospital with nothing left but ashes of what she needs. She aches for him to be real, to be tangible underneath her fingertips and for others to see their love.

She knows they say she's real, but she wants to be sure of it too. As much as she aches to be an illusion, there is part of her that aches to be real as well.

/

He kisses her mouth when the doctors can't see. He tastes like blood and she can barely feel his fingers roaming on her sides. He smiles against her lips, their teeth lightly laying against each others. His tongue slips in her mouth and she presses up against him, tight as she can so maybe she could fuse their bodies together. Sadness is always better when you have someone to share it with.

She opens her eyes to see his are open too, and she finds the color of his eyes to be comforting – like being rocked to sleep after doing so much. She continues to get closer, the friction between them creating warmth she hasn't been able to feel for a very long time.

"You make me feel real," he says to her.

She tries not to cry, because she worries that everything will fall apart if she does, so she smiles at him instead.

"Yeah," she mumbles happily, "I know what you mean."

He holds her for what feels like hours, the daylight trickling in through the window and the smile on her face plastered and big. She feels like she's underwater and all her words are bubbles and her tears just become the ocean, and he smiles at her too, white around the edges as he leaves her alone.

When he finally disappears, she breathes out slow, feeling the bitterness in the air. There are no blue eyes comforting her. There is nothing here. Nothing is left besides her and the white room and the pills that took him away and a mother who cannot see past her tears and ashes of memories.

Sonny gets up slowly and walks to the only window in the room. She has thought of this many times in her life before. She remembers the constant urges she had to end everything and truly feel a sense of calm. The doctors told her that if she ever felt like that again, that she should tell someone.

There is no one. No one can stop her.

She remembers the first time she opened her skin and didn't find perfection. She found blood, and lots of it. There was a bright red mess on her white tiled floor and she can't remember anything else really but the dull ache in her ears as she continued to hear the voice that said she wasn't enough. She remembers her first suicide attempt, with white pills in her tanned hand and the amber liquid that she washed herself away in. She remembers the scar down her face, and the way it felt to cut into her cheek – the tears and the blood mingling together. She remembers being thrown into the hospital, the reactions of her friends and her teachers. She remembers blue, and with that, she opens the window. She only looks down, not around her or at the sky.

She drops quickly, but right before she hits the ground, she sees his face. He smiles at her, his teeth bared and his hair soft and feathery.

She mouths, _I love you_, and that is the last thing she ever does.


End file.
